'Either you fight or you give up'

"I was never in pain," Ernie Davis wrote, "and I never felt sick. That was the hardest part."

Writing in the March 30, 1963 issue of The Saturday Evening Post, Davis said the leukemia that was to take his life came on suddenly.

"One July (1962) day I was practicing football with the College All-Stars, going through final drills for a game against the Gren Bay Packers," he wrote. "The next day I was in a hospital. For many weeks I was to be in that hospital, and others, without knowing why."

Davis wrote that it was a very lonely time. He said he was cheered by letters from friends all over the country, but also worried because they contained expressions of concern over various serious illnesses that Davis was rumored to have.

He said he didn't question his doctors, and he wasn't sure why. He said it was probably because "I was afraid of what the answer would be."

Davis said his doctors finally told him on Oct. 4, 1962.

"I guess you always wonder what you would feel at a time like this," he wrote. "You might think something dramatic would happen, like a lot of things suddenly shooting through your mind.

"All I know is that it just wasn't that way with me. My mind had been conditioned by all the weeks of waiting."

Still, Davis said it was something of a shock when he heard doctors use the word "leukemia" for the first time.

"It's a word that jumps out at you, a frightening word," he wrote.

The doctors told Davis the disease was in remission and that he could start practicing football. "There was, they said, no reason I couldn't play."

Davis never did play, but he said the doctors' encouragement gave him new hope.

"Someplace along the line you have to come to an understanding with yourself, and I had reached mine a long time before, when I was still in this hospital," Davis wrote in the Post article. "Either you fight or you give up.

"For a time I was so despondent I would just lie there, not even wanting to move. One day I got hold of myself. I decided I would face up to whatever I had and try to beat it. I still feel that way."

Davis wrote that one day after he was released from the hospital, he was standing outside a movie theater in Cleveland when a stranger asked him if he was Ernie Davis. Not wanting "any fuss," he said no.

"You're lucky you're not," the stranger told him. "Ernie Davis has leukemia. He won't live six months."

Davis said he just turned and walked away.

"There was nothing I could say," he wrote. "For all I knew the man could have been right."

Davis died May 18, 1963, six or seven months after that encounter, less than seven weeks after the article was published.